Favorite Schools

Favorite Teams

Renowned Cleveland filmmaker Bruce Checefsky has shown his films around the world; Cleveland gets its shot Thursday at Cinematheque

AWAC_WS lowres.jpg

A still from "A Woman and Circles," a 2003 experimental short by Bruce Checefsky. The Cleveland filmmaker will show all eight of his films on Thursday at the Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque.
(Bruce Checefsky)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Bruce Checefsky was arriving as the others were leaving -- just as the Cleveland International Film Festival was drawing to a close.

The Cleveland filmmaker has always flown against the pack, here and everywhere. He was returning from Tel Aviv, Israel, where he had just presented his films at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.
He is one of the area’s most highly regarded filmmakers, having shown his work around the world – everywhere from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the Tate Modern in London, from South Korea to Germany to Poland to Italy.

PREVIEW

The Films of Bruce Checefsky

What: A retrospective featuring eight shorts by the Cleveland filmmaker.

When: 6:45 p.m. Thursday.

Where: The Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque, 11141 East Boulevard.

Admission: $9; $7, members; $6, ages 25 and under. Call 216-421-7450

Yet he remains largely unknown in his hometown – working long and late hours in his studio, in a warehouse on a desolate block in Cleveland ‘s Midtown Corridor.

That’s about to change come Thursday, when the Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque hosts “The Films of Bruce Checefsky.” The retrospective contains all eight of Checefsky’s films, including his most recent, “Witch’s Cradle.” Checefsky will be in attendance for a Q&A after the film.

We already know one of the questions. It always comes up.

“Why make these movies?”

Yes, every filmmaker gets asked that. But no one is making these kind of movies.
His films, you see, are not just his films. They are re-workings of films that he has never seen.

“Many of the films were lost or destroyed or conceived of but never filmed,” says Checefsky, in his Cleveland studio, walking into a room that houses the set for “Witches Cradle.”

“I built this set based on my research,” he says. “Sometimes it’ll take a year of research for a film that’s three minutes long.”

Let’s clarify something if you’re still in the dark about this: Checefsky makes films that existed years ago, but went missing for whatever reason.

Researching those films requires tracking down any notes that were made during the making of them, as well as researching the time and place and mindset of those involved. The process invariably becomes an all-consuming obsession, Checefsky admits.

“Witch’s Cradle,” which clocks in at just over 10 minutes, is a visually stunning re-imagination of a 1943 collaboration between experimental filmmaker Maya Deren and Marcel Duchamp. The original was made in a New York gallery owned by noted art collector Peggy Guggenheim. The film was never finished and is considered lost.

“The struggle for every artist is to find your voice,” says Checefsky. “ For whatever reason, my voice is part of other people’s films.”

Not just any other people’s films. Checefsky is drawn to experimental and avant-garde Eastern European shorts from the 1920s to the 1940s.

“That was an important time for experimental cinema,” he says. “Artists living in Europe between World War I and II were faced with their own mortality because they had seen such destruction in Europe.”

World War I, which started a century ago, inspired an outpouring of art and literary movements – artists confronting modernity as well as the rise of the modern death machine known as war.

Bruce Checefsky.Robert Muller

Checefsky -- who was born in Scranton, Pa., and is of mixed European ethnicity -- became intrigued by the era as a youth when he discovered Man Ray, the Dada and Surrealist artist renowned for his photos, photograms and films.

For years, Checefsky imagined making films.

As Man Ray once said, "It has never been my object to record my dreams, just the determination to realize them."

Checefsky realized his dreams in 2001, when he made “Pharmacy.” The four-minute, 36-second short is based on a 1930 abstract film that was part of the Polish avant-garde movement. The concept of remaking a lost film, along with its shadowy beauty, made “Pharmacy” an international hit.

Well, there was such a thing in the experimental short film world.

“People call it a three-minute blockbuster,” Checefsky jokes. “It played in 35 countries.”

Including a number of countries in Europe, where Checefsky is hailed as an avant-garde pioneer.

“Europe has a longer tradition of experimental cinema, and there is still a large number of people who watch these kind of films and see them as works of art,” says Checefsky. “Many film festivals in America show only narrative films that have a story.”

The fact that he chases wild dreams with images and light and darkness – not straight narratives – is what attracted Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque director John Ewing to Checefsky’s films.

A still from "Pharmacy," Bruce Checefsky's first film, made in 2001.Bruce Checefsky

“He’s a special filmmaker operating on a totally different level, from the concept of re-imagining these old films to his approach to films as art,” says Ewing. “Even most indie filmmakers dream of making ‘Avengers 8’ or some big Hollywood movie, but Bruce has something else in mind.”

Checefsky doesn’t mind being an outsider. It makes sense historically.

“More and more, people here want immediate gratification,” he says. “Which is very different from the sense of urgency people felt because of this impending sense of death and destruction after World War I.”

That’s not to say that Checefsky pines for the good ol’ days of death and destruction.
“When I’m walking on the soil of Central and Eastern Europe, I do feel this attraction, because my family roots are there,” he says. “But I don’t feel sentimental for the past, and it's not like I'm trying to go back in time doing these movies.”

That doesn’t mean the question isn’t asked – the one he hears often.

“I heard it when I was just in Tel Aviv," says Checefsky. "Somebody asked, ‘Who does this? Who spends all this time making a movie that someone already made? What drives someone to do this?' ”

Well?

“These films are not just remakes – because the originals aren’t even there to be remade,” he says. “These are my films.”

Follow Us

cleveland.com is powered by Plain Dealer Publishing Co. and Northeast Ohio Media Group. All rights reserved (About Us).The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Northeast Ohio Media Group LLC.